The importance of clt in the pragmatic development of language learners

Pragmatics and language teaching

Linguistic competence covers a range of linguistic rules, form and signs which are not apt to interpret meaning correctly in different situations. One more crucial part of linguistic competence is pragmatics, in other words, to interpret or convey meaning in context. From the dawn of teaching foreign language users contemplates units of languages and their structures and semantics, thus we must reflect on our teaching and do some reforms the way we utilize with our students. To be more precise, we must expose new capabilities of language in actual situations to our learners. We must create adequate activities to present how language works beyond the function and form which are explained in various rules. By this it cannot be ignored the significance of form and meaning, but on the basis of them language educators must comprise pragmatics and they must instruct students to perceive correct gist of utterance in given situations. At this point it must be mentioned that “In the field of language teaching, pragmatics must not be confused with semantics. Semantics is a study of meaning of words and linguistic constructions themselves, whereas pragmatics handles the meaning of utterences that come from the contexts themselves”.[8]

The empirical studies show that the ability of using linguistic competences’ components during lessons by teachers is managed successfully. They emphasized on interactions between students through different activities, and when language educators are checked their fluency and accuracy that’s say they provide target language learners with English speaking atmosphere. To fulfill the given activities the students had to recall different structures and they used them correctly. Even though they have been using CLT elements in their lessons they are not flourished yet. Empirical studies show that English teachers are making less progress, because they can’t get away the way which they were taught.

Pragmatic competence is undividable part of the language which is vital to understand the intention of the speaker and also the interference between hearer and listener. Pragmatics deals with interpreting meaning through social context where words or sentences are grammatically correct or vice versa and semantically understandable but at the same time the producers of these utterances add their own intentions. The listener interprets it according to given context.

To convey the meaning of utterance appropriately the speaker and listener have to pass through six concepts unconsciously: pragmatic competence, cooperative principle, maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, maxim of relevance, and maxim of manner. These concepts are significant for successful conversation:

-mutual understanding of intention of speaker (pragmatics);

-to use true, relevant and clear information cooperatively by interlocutors (cooperative principle);

-to provide ample information (maxim of quantity);

- shared beliefs, truthfulness (maxim of quality);

- to choose connected information to the topic timely (the maxim of relevance);

- coherent, well-organized utterances (the maxim of manner);

Thus, realizing the importance of abovementioned maxims the English language teachers should be always in pursuit of activities which help to enhance students’ pragmatic competence.